Fenway Lives: Baseball Culture
A Local Legacy Baseball is known as America's favorite pastime and Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, is major league baseball's oldest ballpark. Bostonians have come to love the park as much as they do the team that plays there. Fenway Park, which opened on April 20, 1912, got its name because it was in an area of Boston known as the Fens.

Fenway Park has played a big role in American baseball legend. The largest baseball crowd ever at Fenway was 47,627, for a Yankees doubleheader on September 22, 1935. The longest measurable home run ever hit inside Fenway Park landed in the right-field bleachers. The seat is painted red to mark the spot. Ted Williams hit the home run on June 9, 1946, off Fred Hutchinson of the Detroit Tigers. The blast was measured at 502 feet. Legend says that the ball crashed through the straw hat of the man sitting in the seat -- Section 42, Row 37, Seat 21!

Today, Fenway is one of major league baseball's few remaining old ballparks. There has been talk of replacing it with a more modern structure, but many people in Boston want to restore, rather than replace, their beloved Fenway. In 1998, they organized Save Fenway Park! to promote ways to preserve the old ballpark.